Cena_mark - 2016-11-17 Nothing wrong with rapping. People seem to think it's weird, yet it's completely normal to pick up a guitar and do douchey covers. Hip hop played a big part in my political turn around. Even when I was an obnoxious right winger I was still listening to the likes of Paris and Public Enemy.

Here's where I post music https://soundcloud.com/rumchug
My favorites are Waffle Rumble, Big in Japan, Chosen One, and Fear and Something

I know what you mean, Cena. I can rarely sit through more than a minute of Funny or Die's content (not surprising, given the sort of people behind that website), but this sketch was particularly unbearable. I sortof-kindof made it through the African-American lady suggesting "a television show" as a hip idea for a propaganda vehicle, but the moment the main character (no idea who she is? Jeff Dunham's sister?) said "rapped music video", I had to switch it off. Yes, I get the joke. I get why the writers thought it would be funny. It is not funny.

EvilHomer - 2016-11-17 The weirdest part is, this election cycle was genuinely funny! Trump's one-liners, Hillary falling down, the "basket of deplorables", Wikileaks, the Pepe/Kek conspiracy, ChrisChan appearing on Infowars, and Podesta with his Cheese Pizza - how anyone, even a decrepit old media dinosaur like FoD, can fuck things up and make Election 2k16 painfully unfunny, is beyond me.

EvilHomer - 2016-11-17 Also, what's with people being racist about rappers? When I tell people I'm a pianist, they're all like, "oh, OK, neat, makes sense." But then when Cena, another white guy, says he's a rapper, people are like "really? Oh my god, that's so weird".

Some of the world's best rappers are white: Violent J, the Beastie Boys, John Cena, Blazin Hazen, Jordyn Jones, MC Chris. It's not that strange anymore!

When people told me they hated Hillary Clinton or (far worse) that they were "not fans," I wish I had said in no uncertain terms: "I love Hillary Clinton. I am in awe of her. I am set free by her. She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen."

I wish, in those exchanges, I had not asked gentle, tolerant questions about a hater's ridiculous allergy to her, or Clinton's fictional misdeeds and imagined character flaws. More deeply still, I wish I had not reasoned with anyone, patiently countered their ludicrous emotionalism and psychologically disturbed theories. I wish I had said, flatly, "I love her." As if I had been asked about my mother or daughter. No defensiveness or polemics; not dignifying the crazy allegations with so much as a Snopes link.

Maybe "I love her" seemed too womany, too sentimental, too un-pragmatic. Not coalition-building, kind of culty. But people say with impunity they love Obama, the state of Israel, their churches, Kurt Cobain. In the end, I wish I'd said it because it's true.

And I'm not alone in my commitment. Millions of Clinton's supporters — we were thanked by Clinton as the "secret, private Facebook sites" — expressed it among themselves, all the time, in raptures or happy tears with each new display of our heroine's ferocious intelligence, depth, and courage. We were frankly bewildered by the idea that anyone would hedge their commitment to her ("You don't have to be her friend"; "Yes, she's made mistakes"; "lesser of two evils"). We didn't remember anyone turning to this stock ambivalence when discussing Obama, Babe Ruth, FDR. If only one reporter — they knew about us — could have published a headline like "Clinton Inspires Historic Levels of Adoration From Her Supporters" about the people who have had their lives transformed by the power of her brilliant campaign, unrivaled effectiveness, and extraordinary career. Just one headline like that, like the ones Bill Clinton got.

Usually a legend is made by men and media — the legend of Kennedy, say, or Jim Morrison — and then, much later, a biopic, pretending to evenhandedness, reveals the legend's shortcomings, his "human" side. The shortcomings are almost always something exactly no one actually believes compromises his heroism. His problem drinking. His mistreatment of women. Well, takedowns of Hillary were always already written. She has somehow made the time to hear out each dead-end line of reasoning about her fake mortal sins, and often she has also thanked everyone for sparing her further moral lashings, as if that were a kindness. Under cover of "humanizing" the intimidating valedictorian, reports and investigations and media clichés vilified her. But the feminist hero never got to be a legend first. And yet she is one, easily surpassing Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs.

I want to reverse the usual schedule of things, then. We don't have to wait until she dies to act. Hillary Clinton's name belongs on ships, and airports, and tattoos. She deserves straight-up hagiographies and a sold-out Broadway show called RODHAM. Yes, this cultural canonization is going to come after the chronic, constant, nonstop "On the other hand" sexist hedging around her legacy. But such is the courage of Hillary Clinton and her supporters; we reverse patriarchal orders. Maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. The presidency is too small for her. She belongs to a much more elite class of Americans, the more-than-presidents. Neil Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Fucking Hamilton.

Hillary Clinton did everything right in this campaign, and she won more votes than her opponent did. She won. She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second. Instead, she will be decorated as an epochal heroine far too extraordinary to be contained by the mere White House. Let that revolting president-elect be Millard Fillmore or Herbert Hoover or whatever. Hillary is Athena.

BHWW - 2016-11-18 The woman who wrote this is an actual professional writer for publications like the NY Times, and she wrote a book I'd vaguely heard of - I checked it out after looking at that lennyletter propaganda piece and it sounds like a parody

"Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the “best living writers of English prose”) reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet.

Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind’s great masterpieces—a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism. We all inhabit this fascinating place. But its deep logic, its cultural potential, and its societal impact often elude us. In this deep and thoughtful book, Virginia Heffernan presents an original and far-reaching analysis of what the Internet is and does."

"best living writers of English prose"...by whom?

The review blurbs are even "better",

"My copy of Magic and Loss is sloppily scrawled with all-caps pencillings of words like 'YES!' and 'TRUTH!'"—Mark McConnell, Slate Magazine"

"Heffernan's rhetoric is so dexterous that even digital pessimists like me can groove to her descriptions of ‘achingly beautiful apps,’ her comparison of MP3 compression to ‘Zeuxius's realist paintings from the 5th century BC.’ And Heffernan is subtly less optimistic than she at first seems—she knows that magic is not the opposite of loss, but sometimes its handmaiden. She's written a blazing and finally wise book, passionate in its resistance to the lazy certitudes of a cynically triumphal scientism.”—Michael Robbins, author of The Second Sex and Alien vs. Predator "

As a child I fell in love with technology, but I have to admit I never fell in love with science. I kept hoping that messing around with Macs and Atari and eventually the Internet would nudge me closer to caring about the periodic table, Louis Pasteur and the double-blind studies that now seem to stand for science. As it was, I only cared about the double-blind studies that told me what I wanted to hear—that potatoes are good for you or that people of my height are generally happy—and I liked the phrase “double-blind” when it was on my side because it meant “true” and “take that.”

I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom. At the same time, the people I know who consider themselves scientists by nature seem to be super-skeptical types who can be counted on to denigrate religion, fear climate change and think most people—most Americans—are dopey sheep who believe in angels and know nothing about all the gross carbon they trail, like "Pig-Pen."

I like most people. I don’t fear environmental apocalypse. And I don’t hate religion. Those scientists no doubt see me as a dopey sheep who believes in angels and is carbon-ignorant. I have to say that they may be right.

In the hazy Instagram picture I have in my mind of the mechanisms that animate my ingenious smartphone—a picture that slips in and out of focus, and one I constantly revise—it might as well be angels. At the same time, I have read and heard brilliantly serpentine arguments for and against fracking, not to mention for and against cities and coal and paper (it sidelines carbon and decomposes! it is toxic industrial waste!), and I still don’t know right from wrong when it comes to carbon. All I know is one side of these debates seems maybe slightly more bloodthirsty and opportunistic than the other—but now I can’t remember which one.

Also, at heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it. At least you, dear readers, won’t now storm out of a restaurant like the last person I admitted that to. In New York City saying you’re a creationist is like confessing you think Ahmadinejad has a couple of good points. Maybe I’m the only creationist I know.

This is how I came to it. Like many people, I heard no end of Bible stories as a kid, but in the 1970s in New England they always came with the caveat that they were metaphors. So I read the metaphors of Genesis and Exodus and was amused and bugged and uplifted and moved by them. And then I guess I wanted to know the truth of how the world began, so I was handed the Big Bang. That wasn’t a metaphor, but it wasn’t fact either. It was something called a hypothesis. And it was only a sentence. I was amused and moved, but considerably less amused and moved by the character-free Big Bang story (“something exploded”) than by the twisted and picturesque misadventures of Eve and Adam and Cain and Abel and Abraham.

Later I read Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” and “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, as well as probably a dozen books about evolution and atheism, from Stephen Jay Gould to Sam Harris.

The Darwin, with good reason, stuck with me. Though it’s sometimes poetic, “The Origin of Species” has an enchantingly arid English tone to it; this somber tone was part of a deliberate effort to mark it as science and not science fiction—the “Star Trek” of its time. The book also alights on a tautology that, like all tautologies, is gloriously unimpeachable: Whatever survives survives.

But I still wasn’t sure why a book that never directly touches on human evolution, much less the idea of God, was seen as having unseated the story of creation. In short, “The Origin of Species” is not its own creation story. And while the fact that it stints on metaphor—so as to avoid being like H.G. Wells—neither is it bedrock fact. It’s another hypothesis.

Cut to now. I still read and read and listen and listen. And I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God. The evolutionary psychologists with their just-so stories for everything (“You use a portable Kindle charger because mothers in the primordial forest gathered ginseng”) have become more contradictory than Leviticus. Did you all see that ev-psych now says it’s women who are naturally not monogamous, in spite of the same folks telling us for decades that women are desperate to secure resources for their kids so they frantically sustain wedlock with a rich silverback who will keep them in cashmere?

Sigh. When a social science, made up entirely of observations and hypotheses, tells us first that men are polygamous and women homebodies, and then that men are monogamous and women gallivanters—and, what’s more builds far-fetched protocols of dating and courtship and marriage and divorce around these notions—maybe it’s time to retire the whole approach.

All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”

Spaceman Africa - 2016-11-17 I can't believe the crack endorsement of this and Henry Kissinger wasn't enough to win the election.